Tip Tuesday: Chipping Out of Deep Rough

Stuart Clark of the Steve Dresser Golf Academy at True Blue Golf Club in Pawleys Island, S.C. is here in this video tip to show us how to approach your chip shot from deep Bermuda rough. You’ll see why the proper angle of attack is so important to executing this shot correctly.

Speaker 1:
Hey guys, my name’s Stuart Clark, and I am one of the lead instructors here at the Steve Dresser Golf Academy here in beautiful Pawleys Island at True Blue and Caledonia.

Today we’re going to talk about the thick shot from the side of the green, when the rough is really gnarly (four to five inches). Down here in South Carolina we have what’s called Bermuda 419 grass, which gets really thick, the ball wants to sit down. Notice most of the times when you miss the green you can see the ball, it’s nice and clean. Well today we’re not hitting that shot. Today we’re hitting this shot, and as you can tell you probably can’t even see it.

A lot of times amateurs get into this situation, they put a lot of speed to the shot, and they don’t have the correct angle of attack. And what I mean by angle of attack is if we were coming into this shot super shallow and in from way down here, we’re going to get tangled up in the rough, it’s going to take the face and shut it down, it’s going to come out really low with no spin. So what we want to do is we want to take this club face and open it up. That way, when the grass does grab the hosel it’s going to shut it down a little bit, so we want to open the face and we want our angle of attack steep because we’ve got to get through this rough.

So as you can tell you can’t see it, I’m going to get set up here. And as you’ll notice I’m not going to put a ton of force in this shot because I’m going to let that angle of descending into it just pop the ball up. So I’ve got basically like a 10- or 12-yard shot that I want to carry. The ball’s not going to come out with spin, ever. It’s going to come out like a knuckler. So I’m going to get set down, I’ve got my weight on my left, I’m going to try to get it up kind of like a bunker shot. And as I take the club back I’m just going to sit it right down on top of it.

But what we see out of the amateur student usually is they come in, they’re doing their normal chip shot, and it gets tangled up, they put way too much speed to it, they blast this thing off the back of the green or they come up short.

So Tip Tuesday, in thick rough open that face, get a little steeper on these!